


The Puppiest Strawberry

by lawlipoppie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, MeetCute, THEYRE GONNA SMOOCH :D, genre: nonsense, sorry i can never dial back the sappiness with these two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-02 01:52:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15786516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lawlipoppie/pseuds/lawlipoppie
Summary: Sehun finds some guy throwing up in the bathroom of the club and then they bond over sucky exes.





	The Puppiest Strawberry

**Author's Note:**

> I FINALLY WROTE A THINGY!!! :D pls love it :D it will love you back! :D i promise! :D
> 
> THANK YOU MY BELOVED CUTIE WIFEY FOR ROASTING ME, I'VE NEVER BEEN TENDERER :*
> 
> (just slight warning for multiple mentions of sehun???? being??? cooked???? just like me, above)
> 
> enjooooooooy!!! ^o^!!!

 

 

 

 

Sehun suspects his neck is broken and twirling around on his shoulders. Somewhere between being here to enjoy himself, and being mauled by sadness, he got decapitated. Well, _shit_.

He pats his pockets. Keys, wallet, phone. He didn’t lose anything.

He should leave. He did nothing. Or he did a lot. His mouth tastes like someone else’s. Maybe he kissed someone. Or he’s too drunk to recognize his own mouth anymore. It’s a bastardy, illegitimate mouth. Someone stole his own and sewed another one in its place. His got pawned off at some shop. Bloody, 8/10 for the condition. Worth about one shoe lace, Sehun estimates.

He nearly raises his hand to feel for sutures but instead, he drops his head. He giggles into his chest. It’s sweaty. He’s sweaty. A few hours ago, he was optimistic, he was horny, and he would’ve called it glitter or something. He would think it looks hot. Sweaty pectorals peeking through his unbuttoned shirt. Pheromones. Yum. It should be sexy. So sexy. Someone come lick him. It’s free.

But no, it’s just sweat. Nasty sweat. Smelly sweat. Nobody wants that, no matter how free.

Sehun buys himself another shot. He has too many banknotes in his wallet. He counts to ten and gives up. Ten is already too many banknotes. He shouldn’t have left home with them. He should’ve just brought his card. He doesn’t know how much is left in his account, so out of fear, he would have ordered less – the extreme shame of getting his card declined for insufficient funds – oh _god_. He can’t even rely on shame. And what’s trustier than shame. He’s not any smarter now than he was when he left, so why is he thinking of this only now. He closes the wallet, stuffs it back into his pocket – the left one, which was loosened specifically because of the wallet.

Sehun downs one more shot. His tongue has nothing to say about it. Doesn’t like it, doesn’t dislike it. At the beginning of the night it was so moody, but now it just takes whatever Sehun gives it without complaint. Good tongue. Sehun feels like giving it a pat. Which he won’t do because he might throw up.

He’s drunk now. As he has been for hours. Or months, though there was no alcohol involved in most of that. He would count how many glasses/bottles of alcohol he’d drank if only he could see them, had them in front of him. But he can’t. They were all cleaned up the moment he finished them.

How should he keep track of how much he drank. He thought he could use the erection measure. Boner ruler. Bonruler. Trademark that shit, Sehun is a genius.

But there isn’t any erection happening. His cock doesn’t feel like participating in his wallow party. Or. Dolour banquet, because it can be fancy too. His cock betrayed him. His cock, _too_ , betrayed him.

Sehun looks down at his crotch accusingly. He’s not even sure if the guy is in there anymore. Knock knock. Hello. Anybody home.

Nope. Seems like his dick’s gone to the Bahamas or something for vacay, it’s not there anymore. It should send Sehun a postcard at least. Bring a souvenir back. After everything they went through, Sehun totally deserves one little magnet from his dick to pin takeout menus to the fridge with.

He wobbles. He likes wobbling now. As long as he’s wobbly, he’s safe. Some kinda safe. Wobbling means his brain is sloshing around too much to be able to think anymore. Sehun has no need for brains now. He needs no brains to leave. They can go slosh slosh all they want in his skull, Sehun isn’t affected.

He begins walking. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. He can totally do this. Easy peasy. Life is easy peasy. Peasy easy. He really should eat more peas.

He needs to pee, he realizes though. He thought it was arousal. It’s not, of course. It’s his bladder. Little bladder barely holding on, crying out for help. The poor thing. Sehun pouts, and recalculates the route to find the bathroom. He can be the hero of his bladder. Cue the epic music.

It’s full with cheap things though. He drank cheap things. Numerous, cheap, cheap things. Chirp chirp things. He should’ve drank something expensive from a crystal glass, classical music in the background, wearing a tailored suit. But instead, Sehun is in a dingy, barbarous club, donning jeans he doesn’t remember ever washing and a button shirt from his uni years that has a tiny hole at the armpit (it gives him some ventilation okay) and he drank so much unidentified alcohol that his whole body feels anesthetized. All ready to be wheeled into the surgery room and be harvested till he’s naught but a carcass. Perfect to make broth with. Add some charred onion and ginger.

It really shouldn’t be like this. Sehun sighs, opening the door. He’s swallowed by the bilious nuances of it immediately. _Gay_ club bathroom. The rancid miasma of dried sperm and dismembered romance.  Sehun is also slightly dismembered, otherwise he wouldn’t be feeling so spasmodic, as though he has a couple of legs missing.

Misery is just so poetic. Sehun became an artist against his will. Baptised into it by the whips of anguish.

He looks around. The lighting changed. It’s white. A kind of white that stings, paradisiacal, mean. Sehun squints, sees people, cubicles. The urinals are all taken. An extra urinal that is in fact a dude blowing another dude, piss from the pissing neighbour splattering on his hollowed cheek. Sehun doesn’t judge, but he is reminded that he really, really has to pee because he’s jealous of the guy peeing and not the guy getting blown.

But turns out that he’s not the only one. He trudges deeper into the bathroom, through the stalls. He goes towards the last one. Nobody and everyone wants that one. His knees are slightly buckling. His bladder is weeping. Mayday. Mayday.

Sehun unzips and pees. He is in heaven. Euphoria. Peeing. Peeing is so wonderful. So underrated. Justice for peeing. The way it hits against the bowl. Just music to his ears. He also does a fabulous aim-job, for there is not a trace of any splattering anywhere. Sehun is so good at peeing. No Pollock-ing. He pets his dick. It can go back to its Bahamas vacay now, till Sehun has to summon it again for other urinary matters. It was great doing business with you.

Sehun is finished now. Peeing: done. He can proceed into the next level. He flushes, watching the water thrash into the bowl. Sehun is still basking in the afterglow.

He redoes his zipper, checks that his shirt is tucked as deeply as it can be into his pants so that the wrinkles are hidden, then turns to leave. He makes an increment of a pivot when he smashes into the wall of the cubicle, weak wood screaming bloody murder under his weight. Sehun regains his footing, loses it again, and hits his shoulder on the corner.

A flurry of something just pushed him. Human or inhuman. A monster. A rude ass miscreation just _pushed_ him.

Sehun blinks and blinks, trying to coax the world into stillness for a second. He’s preparing an ireful mouth of expletives when he hears. And he sees.

The boy is vomiting. The boy who hit him, hunched over, heaving, little chokes, big chokes, humongous chokes. The tremblor of his folded legs is violent, the gritty fluid pouring in gushes.

Sehun swallows all the expletives. He straightens a bit. He feels bad for him. Vomiting sucks. Everything about it. And most certainly, the cause behind it is what sucks the most.

Sehun doesn’t leave. He waits, for some reason. He waits for the boy to be done. The gaps between the heaves increase bit by bit, then it’s only dry retching, clean coughs. Then no coughs at all. His hand is trembling. The hand that had been holding his whole fringe away from his face, is trembling.

He throws a glance over his shoulder at Sehun.

Smile piss vomit cheeks lights and bright teeth. Sehun grips onto the wall of the cubicle. Small figure when crouched. Tiny. A soft baby on the floor. He gets up, and the tininess lessens. The broken smile is closer and bigger, he's still soft, but not a baby. A man. A soft baby man, smile huge and splendid and misfitting. Warping perspectives.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and straightens up fully.

“I can put a much better show on for you, babe,” he says. Lithe voice, but serrated, marring.

Sehun wobbles a bit more. He’s not literally wobbling. He’s still. But he doesn’t feel like that. He’s just not stable, steady, sane.

The boy shakes his head. His hair flails. So his isn’t cemented with hairspray. Sehun could pull a Michelangelo out of his own.

“Oh, I forgot what comes next.” He raises his hand, and squints. Sehun squints too. “are you a vegetable? Cause you’d be a cute—cumber.”

He looks up. Soulless. His soul is in the Bahamas with Sehun’s dick. That’s some heaven where rebelling body parts go. “I fucking hate cucumbers, please don’t be a cucumber. I might be here to toss some salad, but not that kinda salad.”

“Can I be cute though?” Is Sehun ever cute. Sehun is too big to be cute. Sehun is too hung up to be cute. Sehun cannot be cute when he’s only a stringy carcass.

The boy looks up. He looks a little less blind now. Like he sees. “You cute. You can _absolutely_ be cute.”

“Oh, thank you,” Sehun says. He’s been hooted at here and there tonight. But nothing quite as direct and nonsexual as this. He feels better. So far his advances flopped, his attempts at dancing flopped, his dick flopped. Sehun is a total flop. A total flip flop.

“You’re…cute too,” Sehun replies, overlate.

Maybe he’s seen him around. Sehun doesn’t know. People didn’t have faces anymore after his first shot. They have bodies and lips. Things that entice. Not faces. Faces are too complex for the kin of shallowness he came here to find. He has temporary, alcohol induced prosopagnosia.

But this boy has a face. It has a nose, eyes, lips, cheeks. Everything is there. He doesn’t have anything missing. Nothing pawned off. They’re not particular on their own, lips like a milliard others and eyes like a milliard others, pupils of the same black as any black. Sehun’s gaze springing from feature to feature, hop hop, bunny in a meadow.

The whole of it is mellifluent, complaisant. A cosiness. Sehun looks at it the same way he’d look at a medley of happiness, a springtime scenery. Vibrancy underneath calmness of composition.

He really is cute.

Sehun settles better against the wall. The boy doesn’t seem like he wants to leave, and Sehun doesn’t really want to leave either. Leave and go where. He’d been on his way out, but he had no idea what to do once he was outside. So being here seems about right.

His back slides down, and Sehun goes with it, until he’s semi-crouching against the wall. The boy follows him, semi-crouches across him. Someone is definitely fucking in one of the cubicles. Maybe two couples. Sehun hears it all in stereo quality, but it doesn’t bother him. He’s more focused on the hands of the boy.

One of them is scrawled all over. Little symbols, bleeding ink, smudges and erasures. He reads a few words.

“I see you got more lines,” he says. Someone flushes. A sudden, mini thunderstorm.

“Allow me to wow you some more.” the boy says when it’s quiet again, clearing his throat. It’s so frail. He’s all mush. Overripe. He raises his hand, squints. Wrinkles around the corners of his eyes, branches, streams. “Let me tie your shoes, cause I don’t want you falling for anyone else.”

Sehun laughs. This one is cute. He would fall for it if it was delivered with a bit more gusto.

The boy looks down at Sehun’s feet. “You don’t have any shoelaces though. This one is exclusive to people with shoelaces.” He makes a tsk tsk noise.

Sehun finishes his laughter. “Dammit.”

“I wanna live in your socks so I can—“ lip lick. “Be with you every step of the way.”

Sehun looks down too. “I’m sure they stink by now.”

“And I’d get squashed. You’re a pretty big boy.”

Sehun is a boy? He thought he was a man. Maybe he’s a man. But someone who makes such poor decisions couldn’t truly be grown up. Infantile, callow mistakes. Infantile coping method. Or running away. This is just running away.

Both of them are a mess on the floor of a bathroom, yet running for their lives. What men. They’re only just silly little boys.

“I’d be Baekhyeon mash by the time I got out of your socks,” he slurs, elongated and worn. “I’m Baekhyeon by the way.” He meets eyes with Sehun. Turbid. “And it’s the name you’ll be moaning tonight.” A two eyed-wink and a gaudy lip lick that nearly reaches his chin. “Someone gotta moan it since that motherfucker won’t do it anymore, hahahaha.” He speaks the hahaha. It’s part of the sentence, it’s one line from the script. The tragedian displaced in an idyll.

“Who?” Sehun asks, suddenly thinking that _he_ is moaning some name now, for sure. He liked moaning names. Pieces of it. The vowels of it. Sehun’s name only has two vowels. Not very moan-able. But he could still make it out, that when _he_ moaned, it was Sehun’s name.

“Him. That motherfucker. That…dude, guy, piece of shit,” he gesticulates. “My ex. Haha.”

Sehun stares. At Baekhyeon. His name is Baekhyeon. Boy Baekhyeon. Who doesn’t remember the name of his ex. Sehun doesn’t remember the name of his own either. Exes just don’t have names anymore. Such namelessness.

“What did he do?” Sehun asks. Because there are different levels of motherfuckery. Different levels of assholery.

Baekhyeon’s face twists. A wrung cloth, drained completely, ready to be hung to dry. “He just broke up with me.” He sniffles once, then makes a face. Someone, in some stall, is in labour, birthing one feisty, malodorous dump. Sehun’s eyes are almost watering from the stench. Baekhyeon soldiers on. “I don’t like people breaking up with me. That’s so cruel. It _hurts_ me. How can you hurt me? I don’t deserve to be hurt. Hurting _hurts_.”

Sehun nods. He agrees. To all of this. He pouts. “My motherfucker broke up with me too.”

The guy finally drops the dump. The floor shakes for a second.

Baekhyeon shuffles his legs a bit closer to Sehun. His eyes are round. “All of a sudden?”

“All of a sudden,” Sehun confirms. One second they were okay, and the next, he was pushing Sehun off a cliff.

They nod. Bonding nod. Understanding nod. Empathy nod. Sympathy nod. A meaningful, momentous nod worth a thousand nods.

Baekhyeon deflates, his eyes shrinking back into lunes. “Is this something they learn at the shitty ex convention,” he mutters.

Sehun wonders this too. “He did it so phantom-pheno-ph-“ That word is too long and too complicated for his tongue. He breathes in the tiniest amount of fetid, dump-y air, and tries again. “He did it so phenomenally bad.”

“Right?” Baekhyeon bursts. “And like,” he chokes on an inhale. “I’m sure there are tutorials on how to break up with people. That shit is pretty much rocket surgery. Couldn’t he do a little research on it?”

Sehun nods, his slushy brain groaning. His vision is starting to smear from the lights and the off-whiteness of the surroundings. But Baekhyeon, just Baekhyeon is clear. Ish. “Why did your motherfucker break up with you?”

Baekhyeon rolls his eyes. Licks his lips, non-sleazily. “He just…said something about wanting another kind of life? Like what other kind of life is there even? He’s gonna be the same man and everything. Breathing the same air. It wasn’t like I was polluting his life with my farts?” he says. Mordant questions; achromatized, bestrewn by the echo in the bathroom, electro, pissing sounds, and shoe taps among them.

Sehun listens. That sounds familiar. Like classical breakup text.

“It’s all because I want something else in life now, not because we’re not working anymore,” Baekhyeon continues, an enactment, tone sombre, weepy. Then he crumbles. “Nya nya nya blah blah blah tra la la, pfff,” he jabbers, both sulky and imperious.

Nya nya nya blah blah blah tra la la. Sehun feels this. Sehun relates to this.

“I get you,” he says. His everything is cramping on him in this position, but is he going to move? No. Sehun will suffer through it, because suffering fits this atmosphere.

“You do?” Baekhyeon asks, pulled out of his sullenness. “Why? What did your motherfucker do?”

Sehun remembers everything, but he also doesn’t remember anything. Though, TL; DR, “He left me.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. One day he decided gayness wasn’t for him anymore. He didn’t like any dick other than his own anymore.” This is a bad way to put it, perhaps insensitive, but there’s no denying the fact that he treated being with Sehun like something transient. A fling. A test. A taste. Something that would never, could never be part of a bigger picture.

Baekhyeon winces. Sehun winces. Together, they wince. “Fuck that.”

“Fuck him, really,” Sehun spouts.

“I don’t think he’ll be getting fucked anymore,” Baekhyeon says then, glum. Then he realizes what he said is a little funny, and adds, “Hehe.”

Sehun stares blankly for a second, before a chuckle breaks through his lips. He sprays a bit of saliva on Baekhyeon. Just a little. For good luck. “He better not get fucked ever again. He doesn’t deserve any dick. Not even a rubber one. And certainly he didn’t deserve _mine_.”

Sehun swallows. He tastes something. Venom.

He looks at Baekhyeon. He’s closer to him now. Or there’s been no shortening in the distance between them, but the way he’s gazing at Sehun seems to have brought him so much closer. “Your dick is so precious. He really didn’t deserve it,” he says.

“You think my dick is precious?” Sehun’s heart lurches. Goes off track for a second before it settles back into place.

Baekhyeon wiggles a finger in front of his face. “All dicks are precious save for mine and your motherfucker’s.”

Sehun is being indoctrinated with dick justice. “Your dick is precious.”

“Very precious.” The finger wiggles once more, authoritative.

“Very precious,” Sehun repeats.

Baekhyeon halts, then giggles. Cute giggle. The finger drops as the giggle rises. Sehun sketches a smile in response.

A moment of silence is hachured between them. Two toilets flushing, a sink running, someone peeing. Best time and place to meet someone new, and to have a good diss battle about exes. What a wonderful circumstance. Sehun feels like laughing.

Baekhyeon’s smile is still there, pinned between his cheeks. “So, uh-“ he says, briefly looking at his inked hand. “You, you’re…?” His gaze questions Sehun pointedly.

Sehun frowns. “Dumped.”

“Yeah, but you’re also—“ The questioning intensifies.

Sehun’s frown also intensifies. “Oh.”

“Oh?”

He knows what follows after that. His own name. He knows it. But it takes a while for it to drop on his tongue. “Sehun. The name you’ll be moaning tonight.”

When Baekhyeon processes what he just said, he chuckles, trace amounts of impudence bespeckled through it. “Will I?”

Sehun backtracks. “Well, if you want?”

“I might just want,” Baekhyeon nods. “But Sehun—“

“Mm?”

“Sorry, but you owe me a drink.” Baekhyeon’s tone changes, straightens.

Sehun’s forehead scrunches. “Why?”

“Because-“ he halts. Then looks back at his hand. “When I saw you I dropped mine.”

Sehun laughs. The delivery. The mood. The sureness, the unsureness, the acknowledged lameness. Pure comedic genius. Sehun melts. His limbs run away from him, his mouth runs loose. _Whoa_.

“I’m taking that as a yes,” Baekhyeon says, his laughter joining Sehun’s.

“Should we even be drinking more?” Sehun inquests. Because while this was nothing but another horrible pick up line, the intent of it is genuine. And Sehun can’t get out of his mind the sight of Baekhyeon vomiting.

“I only ended up like this because I ate something that upset my stomach,” Baekhyeon recites. “Otherwise I could really use a drink. Or two.” He peers at Sehun through his eyelashes. “Please drink with me.”

A drink. Or two. With Baekhyeon. Sehun could maybe have three with him. Could have six. Could be with him just until he needs to pee again.

That sounds _fantastic_. “We should go.”

Baekhyeon appears almost surprised. “So these worked in the end,” he says, waving his hand in front of his face. The wingman. That hand was his wingman. It’s the same hand he offers to Sehun so he can get up.

Getting up is hard. His body has been petrified in this position. It creaks and fights. They groan in unison.

Baekhyeon stops at the sink. He washes his hands. The sink is dirty. The water runs grey, turning lighter and lighter, then transparent. They’re all gone now. Condolences.

“My best friend wrote them for me,” Baekhyeon says. “Then he dropped me off in front of this club.”

Sehun looks him dead in the eye and says, “Lmao,” at which Baekhyeon chokes a little on the water he’s rinsing his mouth with.

Baekhyeon washes his hands again, and then Sehun does too. They have nothing to wipe them on. Baekhyeon shakes them, then runs them over his legs. He could’ve wiped them on Sehun. He feels just about like a rag anyway. Might as well be useful. He ends up being only his own rag, for Baekhyeon is already stepping towards the exit. Sehun follows him.

Out means going through people. Sequined, scaly skin. A horny fish market, flopping helplessly in concupiscence, yaps gaping for smoke, and smelling just as bad. They make way. Estuaries for both of them to pass. The party is at its climax at this hour. Picturesquest homoeroticism. Friday night. People who finished school or work, went home, put the mating suits on, and came here. The drunkenness is in its primetime.

Baekhyeon is behind him, beside him, in front of him, until they’re spit out of the venters of the carousal. Sehun feels sticky, besmeared in phantom genital goo. The air outside is cool. Is nearly aseptic, scraping at Sehun’s nose. Breathing in, Sehun gains a slight acuity. He’s still wobble wobble, but stabilized. He has a bit of discernment, a bit more scaffolding. A tiny tiny tiny bit, blink and you’ll miss it, but it’s there.

“You’re drunk off your ass, aren’t you?” he hears. Baekhyeon. This is Baekhyeon’s voice. From the bathroom to here, Sehun already forgot the tone of it, and he relearns it anew.

“I think I still have my ass with me, I didn’t lose it anywhere,” Sehun says. Slurs, fruitlessly fighting the lethargy of his tongue. He reaches behind himself to search for it. Yes. It’s there, holding on tight. He gives it a pat.

Baekhyeon comes into view. Sehun didn’t forget his face. This one isn’t forgettable. It’s catchy. Scarifying.

“It’s totally still there, not that I’ve been ogling it.”

“You’ve been ogling my ass?”

“Can you blame me?”

“I’d rather thank you.” He swears he can feel his ass preening. The cheeks definitely clenched. He always liked ass attention. Asstention.

“No need,” he says, hand flopping in some gesture. “Now let’s go find ourselves a place.”

He twines his arm with Sehun’s. Elbow nook to elbow nook, Baekhyeon tugging, driving, being Sehun’s gentle, cute, smiley locomotive. Choo choo. Sehun focuses on his footing, on the puncture of the street lights over Baekhyeon’s visage. He’s a stranger and he’s not. He’s a stranger. He’s totally a stranger. But he’s letting Sehun lean a bit on him, even though in his eyes, he’s, like, toothpick sized right now, and he wants to give Sehun another drink, wants to spend some time with him, so how much of a stranger can he be. Toothpick-y good boy.

Sehun follows him. Sehun has nothing better to do than go after toothpick-y kind boys who ogle his ass. At home, he’ll just have his unmade bed and the swelter. This is much better.

“Here should be fine. They got tables and drinks. That’s all we need,” Baekhyeon says. He’s slurring too. But less than Sehun. He trained his tongue well, unlike him, whose tongue is misbehaving.

“And seats. We need seats too.”

“They got seats,” he squints. The avenue is tight. It’s packed. Bars, club, pubs, wall to wall, an orgy of establishments facilitating orgies. If Sehun were sober, he would judge it from a profitability and business point of view, but he’s not sober and he just wants to sit and stare some more at the boy.

“Perfect.”

 

 

 

 

Sehun is sitting across from Baekhyeon. The table between them now has two glasses, four soju bottles, three little bowls and one big plate with one big pajeon, steaming, crunchy. Corn puffs, anchovy nuts, acorn jelly. Paraphernalia for a whole night of not going home, which they both seem very keen on.

Baekhyeon looks at what they got. He smiles. His cheeks are plump. Extra plump when he smiles. Round. Bubbles. Soap bubbles. Shiny, with rainbow reflections. He’s made of fairy-tales, not flesh, volatile and immortal. Sehun wants to poke his nose into it. Would it accept him. Would it reject him.

Sehun shakes his head, picks a peanut, picks a soju bottle, opens it, pours one glass, pours two, because they’re two people at this table.

“One shot,” Baekhyeon declares, picking up the glass.

“One shot!”

Pyre flows down his throat, settling at the bottom of his stomach. Going back to self-arson. Except now it’s not-alone, mutual arson. Accomplice of one another, setting each other on fire. Delicious. Sehun picks a peanut, marries it with a tiny anchovy, threesomes it with another peanut.

“He didn’t like drinking soju,” Baekhyeon says, words downturned, but crispy.

“Mine didn’t either. But I also don’t, so.” Alcohol is just so nasty. Why. Just why is this even a thing.

“I hate it,” Baekhyeon says, wrinkling his nose. He slams the glass on the table again.

Sehun reaches for the bottle, pours them both another round of shots. He doesn’t have coordination to do much else, but when it comes to pouring more alcohol, he’s one smooth fucker at it.

So they drink, because their exes didn’t like it. They drink out of spite. Out of pettiness. Of defiance.

The first bottle is down. The room is back to its usual spinning program. Twirling in rounds around Sehun. But Baekhyeon. Baekhyeon is still. Boy-man Baekhyeon is still.

“How old are you?” Sehun asks, curious, so very curious, because Baekhyeon entirely is curious.

Baekhyeon laughs, waves, vivid and ungainly. “Not old enough to be your daddy. Or rich enough, for that matter. Not after this night.”

Sehun can relate to that. Heartbreak is expensive. He should be compensated. Send the motherfucker a bill for all the binge stress eating and drinking he did. And the damage to his stomach. His insurance doesn’t cover this. Why are you in the disintoxication ward? Because I got dumped. They aren’t gonna cover that. Hell no.

“I don’t want a daddy?” Sehun says though. Because daddy. A kink. A lifestyle. Mashed together. Paraphilic quotidian batter. Sehun shakes his head. Not appealing right now. The universe quakes, agrees with him. “I don’t want a daddy. One father figure in my life is enough.”

He looks ahead. Baekhyeon picks an anchovy, beheads it, guts the tiny thing with the tip of his nail, then plops it into his mouth. Sehun doesn’t follow that motion. He remains fixated on his hands. Sinewy hands. Five fingers on each, each finger pretty. Sehun doesn't see ugliness, misshapen nailbeds, jagged edges on any finger. It’s all manicured, accordant. A little mole on his thumb. Sehun nearly sees it as it being on the nail, and he leans in a little to get closer to check to see if it really is on it, or on the cuticle, or higher onto the skin. He can’t tell. Maybe it’s only a stain. A chocolate chip, about 80 to 90 percent cacao, the bougie kind, judging by the darkness. Or a little black hole. Sehun would like to be sucked in there and travel to other dimensions. There’s bound to be places where life is better than what he has right now. He would buy a ticket to travel through Baekhyeon’s thumb mole right now. He would get out of paying rent next week too. Win win.

He doesn’t gut the next anchovy. He chews and he laughs. Again. Sehun looks at his face now.

“What do you want then, if not a daddy?” The tail of the anchovy is sticking out of his lips. Their overall tone is of a greyed fuchsia, garnet at the corners, cotton candy on the hills of the cupid bow, where light falls. Downy. What a lucky anchovy. Even anchovies are luckier than him. Can’t he be an anchovy. Is it too late.

“Peace? A longer phone charger? A boyfriend?”

Sehun just likes peace and long phone chargers and boyfriends. And he has none of these right now.

He especially likes having a boyfriend. What’s bad about that. Boyfriends that aren’t _him_ are great. Having someone to scrub his back and give him pecks is great. Give him a boyfriend. He deserves it. His back can only go unwashed for so long.

Baekhyeon picks up his chopsticks. “I’m old enough to be your boyfriend.” He breaks a piece of the pajeon, cut cleanly. A proportionate square adjacent to the axis of the pancake.

This is some magnificent skill. Sehun approves. “Please be my boyfriend then.”

Baekhyeon’s scrunches his nose. Two creases on the right, three creases on the left. Then a second later, he laughs. The two creases become three too, three and three and Sehun is happy.

“I can tell you about my specs too,” he says, clearing his throat after chewing. He straightens his shoulders, his back, his neck, he’s all impaled on seriousness as he peers at Sehun. His shoulders are so broad. Sehun can sleep on them. “First of all, my arm does this.” He raises it into the air. Sehun narrows his eyes, not seeing what’s special about it. Then it clicks.

“It’s like a lightning bolt.”

“Oh shit, that’s so _cool_ ,” Sehun says, immediately stretching out his own arm to see if it has the same level of crookedness. It doesn’t. Baekhyeon laughs at him.

“Only I can do it, I tell you. I’m the only one in the universe, just so you know what a special specimen you have here,” speaks Baekhyeon, with an overzealous amount of haughtiness. “ _And_!” Pause for dramatic effect, which does increase the dramatism of what’s about to drop tenfold. “I can do _this_ with my fingers.”

This _this_ is...Baekhyeon shaking his hand really hard and his ring finger moving with it as though it’s broken from the rest of it. Sehun squints. It’s moving so fast that it creates that fan illusion that he cannot stop looking at.

Baekhyun stops, and laughs.

“So you’re saying I can’t do that?” Sehun asks.

“Don’t even _try_.” And then, chin pointed down, eyebrows high, and the sleaziest, filthiest, most lubricous smirk. “Who doesn’t like a man with talented fingers.”

Sehun chokes, lightly. A surprised, offended hiccup.

“And I’m also a certified good boyfriend and everything. Got my Masters in Boyfriendship. Totally legit,” he wiggles his eyebrows saucily. It would've had the desired effect if his eyebrows were actually visible from under his bangs.

“You sound like a telemarketer,” Sehun accuses.

“But are you buying?”

“I’m totally buying, I’ll take three of you pretty please.” Sehun is very ready to put his wallet on the table. And his kidneys. However much three Baekhyeons cost.

Baekhyeon makes an apologetic face. “Sorry, my mama could produce just one.”

“Oh. Can I take just this one then?”

“No. I’m not for sale.”

But before Sehun gets to protest, for he is truly scandalized, Baekhyeon goes on.

“But what specs do _you_ have?”

_Oh._

Sehun can’t think of a lot of wooing artifices. His fingers aren’t special. No wizardry, no hocus pocus, no abracadabra.  

“Just get me because I’m discounted today,” he says. “90% off.” Like those things that are slightly damaged. The scum. Sehun is blemished to the bone.

Baekhyeon halts, two droplets of soy vinegar falling on the plate. Then he bursts into laughter. A detonation of gone eyes and bared teeth and jingles and spit spray. Sehun is not funny enough to deserve this spectacle. It’s too glorious. He’s not worthy.

“I’ll take you, I’ll take you then,” he says, re-dipping the piece in the sauce, re-saturating it like a heathen. That must be so sour. “Bag yourself up real nice for me.” With his other hand, he picks four corn puffs, and deposits them on the jeon plate in front of Sehun. They’re yellow orange. Gold. Sehun’s gold coins for selling himself. Cute, lovelorn boyfriend trafficking.

Sehun smiles. He’s Baekhyeon’s thing now. He belongs now. “I have warranty too. Six months. You can return me any time if you find anything defective.” He plops two puffs into his mouth. Salty, stinky gold.

“I suspect that won’t be the case,” he says, cheek pregnant with pancake. “I like you as you are.”

Sehun blushes. Sehun’s face is burning. Second degree burn. He has to wrap himself in foil and stew in the seductiveness Baekhyeon is drowning him into. Pull him out when the skin of his cheeks is caramelized, golden brown, just right to bite into.

Sehun would very much like Baekhyeon to bite his cheeks. Baekhyeon, please offer to do that. Sehun’s cheeks are all yours.

“I like you as you are too,” he says, at last, feathery and demure.

“Let’s drink to that!” Baekhyeon quips, reaching for another bottle of soju. He pours two glasses. They have a toast.

“To the boyfriendship!”

They don’t stop at one shot. They stop at five. Rapid fire shit-facing.

Now Sehun has to hold his head in his hands to stop it from spinning. It’s in a carousel. Merrily going around and around and around.

But the only thing that actually anchors him is staring at Baekhyeon. At the fine musculature of his hands, his arms, skin thin and permissive, letting the mechanism and protrusion show through. Their coloration also stands out. His overall skin tone does. The lights on it can be so bright, but the darks are never black. Darkness doesn’t like him. He repels it. He’s a child of the light.

It’s entrancing. Sehun really can’t stop staring at his hands.

“Wanna hold it?” Baekhyeon says. It’s either that Sehun’s ears are drunk, or Baekhyeon is drunker, for that barely sounded like words.

“Hold what?”

“This gorgie.”

His hand. His hand is the gorgie. The hand he’s proffering to Sehun.

“How long has it been since Gorgie was last held?”

“Since that motherfucker fucked off outta my life.”

“Oh. Me too. Mine hasn’t been held since then either.”

They’re so pitiful. Why is everything so pitiful.

“Let’s hold hands,” Baekhyeon says, going ahead and snatching Sehun’s away from his face. He can take it and run away with it. Sehun wouldn’t mind. This is a kind of theft he approves of.

But Baekhyeon doesn’t go far with it. He just lets them both fall right between them. On the border.

The table has five planks. The third one is the border between them. Neutral ground. The threshold and token of their inebriation. So far, neither of them has passed the second plank.

And now, palm over palm, they toy with the border. Baekhyeon’s digits are lissom, but their grip is firm as much as it is soft. The hold is loose in itself, but the weight of it is what makes Sehun shiver. What makes him like it so much. He moves his fingers slightly over the side of Baekhyeon’s palm. Baekhyeon mirrors the gesture. It’s anodyne, tickly.

“I never give back the hands I take,” Baekhyeon says then.

“Where do you keep them?” Hands can’t be kept for good. Sehun never thought anyone would want his for good.

“In jars in the fridge,” Baekhyeon replies, squeezing his fingers around Sehun’s.

He’s cute he’s hot he’s cute he’s hot, he’s very cute, very hot. _The witticism_. Sehun is cooked little by little. He’s about a medium rare now, seared well on all sides. He’s really hungry. Not for food. A hunger within him that isn’t a tantrum from his tummy.

He has to get a grip on himself. A grip. He needs a grip. He has no idea what to grip onto.

Baekhyeon’s at the fourth plank now, Sehun’s elbows on the fifth, arms close to himself. “You’re pretty,” he breathes.

Sehun can’t look away. He feels like he hasn’t looked away ever since he put eyes on him. “You’re so pretty,” Sehun murmurs back, a sequel to what Baekhyeon said.

Baekhyeon’s mouth twirls at the ends. “Bet you’re even prettier when I’m sober.”

This is precisely the prismatic milieu of overeager flirting. This is precisely what melts Sehun the most. “I don’t think so,” Sehun says. His cheeks are ablaze. But good ablaze.

“I think so,” Baekhyeon counters. His breath grazes Sehun’s cheek. A salve for the havoc there.

Sehun shakes his head. “I can’t even imagine how you could be prettier than you are right now.” Sehun is so drunk that he can barely see, but he can see Baekhyeon.

“I might be,” he says. “I don’t know.”

“I’d like to find out.”

Baekhyeon stills, then smiles, distancing himself from Sehun.

A blasé mien now, softness accentuated to the point of inertia. Then his dimple incises into his cheek.

Sehun’s gaze drops to his lips. The laxity of his mouth. Mouthie. It's too cute to be just a mouth. Mouths are all the other ones. Baekhyeon’s is cute and it's a mouthie. Sehun wonders if it would feel just as cute under his own.

It’s too soon to wonder about this, Sehun scolds himself. It’s too soon to _want_ this. He quickly chases the thought away with another one of his corn puffs.

“We’re too gorgeous to be going through this,” Sehun bursts. This is a very poor save, but a save nonetheless.

He reaches for another bottle. As long as Sehun doesn’t move too much and too brusquely, he doesn’t sense his accentuated state of intoxication. So he downs the glass when Baekhyeon takes the bottle from him and pours them a round.

“To our gorgeousness!” Baekhyeon cheers, clinking his glass with Sehun’s.

This is awful. Sehun wants more. Baekhyeon wants more. So they have another glass. That’s enough for this interval of ruination.

Baekhyeon collapses back into his seat. So far away from Sehun. Too far away. Come closer, Baekhyeon.

Sehun moues and picks up his chopsticks. He painstakingly extracts one piece of green onion poking out of the batter. It looks like a snake. A dead snake. Sehun doesn’t like snakes, dead or alive or in-between.

He dips it into the soy vinegar, and holds it up. Baekhyeon studies it blearily for a fraction before leaning forward and taking it in his mouth. Sehun smiles. He fed Baekhyeon. He just fed Baekhyeon. He cannot explain why it is so immensely gratifying. Baekhyeon nom noms it adorably.

But before the adorable nom noms end, Baekhyeon says, “He was pretty damn gorgeous too.” His last chew leaves dejection on his lips.

Sehun puts the chopsticks down. He was, wasn’t he. He was pretty damn gorgeous.

Their mouths and minds really can’t help traipsing from tragedy to tragedy, from merriment to merriment, from resentment to resentment and docking, at last, on silence.

“Fuck Park Chanyeol, really,” Baekhyeon sighs at the end of his powers.

“Fucking Park Chanyeol,” Sehun adds, sighs, also at the end of his powers.

A while after the demise of Sehun’s sigh, Baekhyeon perks up. “Wait, do you know my Chanyeol?”

“No, I know _my_ Chanyeol.”

“No, like,” Baekhyeon shakes his head, reaches for his phone. He scrolls for a while. Sehun feels like he’s missing something, but his sloshy brain cannot be assed to do any processing right now.

Baekhyeon shows his phone to him. “This Chanyeol?”

Sehun frowns. He makes out two people in the picture, one of which is currently in front of him, and the other is precisely, obviously- “That’s my ex,” Sehun blurts. “My Chanyeol.”

“No, that’s _my_ Chanyeol,” Baekhyeon counters, pushing his phone into Sehun’s face. Sehun takes it, zooms in, frowns even harder.

“ _My_ Chanyeol,” he insists. He hasn’t seen him in so long. He feels a pang somewhere unknown.

The phone starts shaking in his hand. Sehun has put two and two together, he knows he has, but his mind refused to disclose it to him.

Until now.

“It’s the same Chanyeol. We have the same ex,” he says.

“Can’t be,” Baekhyeon cuts. “When did you break up?”

“Almost 3 months ago.”

Baekhyeon swallows, and backs down. “What the _fuck_.”

Sehun doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t ask him.

And Baekhyeon continues. “He broke up with me three months ago too.”

Sehun closes his eyes.

Boom boom boom the music, boom boom boom his heart in his throat, boom boom boom. His finger on the table, boom boom boom.

Sehun looks at his hand. He moves his fingers. He can still move them. He’s alive. He must be, if he can move it.

He should laugh. No way this is happening. Hahahaha. No way. Hahahahaha.

_Fuck._

He peers at Baekhyeon. His complexion jaundiced, and he spreads a sallow hum over the back of his palm as he buries his head into his arms. The position of a crushed man.

“We were dumped by the same person. It’s the same motherfucker.”

The statement drifts between them until they’re willing to understand.

“This means…we got cheated on?” Sehun mutters, trying to make sense of this ordeal. To break up with two people at the same time, one must be in a relationship with two people at the same time.

He had to be with both of them to dump them.

Sehun beheads and guts a fat anchovy, and puts it back into the bowl. “We got cheated on.”

Baekhyeon’s face turns grim. The darkness stains it deeply. The patches of light bleach him. He doesn’t know what Baekhyeon looks like in a gentle ambiance, under a luminescence that doesn't seem to shear him into little shreds, but now, his eyes are auric, they are red, they are a black that is an abysm and not a pigment. His smile is shiny, and it's claret, it's cruor, it's a wound, the white of the teeth being the puss behind. His cheeks are full, his whole face working to hold them up and high, and then they're thawed, barely held by the strings of his muscles, thinned till rachitic.

“We got cheated on.”

It’s been a handful of fortnights, Sehun likes to think of it as in his head. A hazy period, not a number, even though he knows that five hours ago, it’s been exactly eighty-four days since Chanyeol broke up with him. It’s been a handful of fortnights of sleeplessness and misalignment, of tossing, and of lethargy.

And he wasn’t the only one going through this.  

Sehun chuckles, the driest, most desiccated sound. “He really cheated.”

The cretinism of unknowing. How blunt and powerful it is. It didn’t hit, but it fell, dropped on Sehun when he wasn’t expecting it. He broke apart as things started to be wean together - patchwork of unexplainable happenstances suddenly catching contour and basis.

With his chopsticks, Baekhyeon picks the anchovy Sehun beheaded. He bites off the tail. “But for how long were you together?”

“About half a year.”

“Fuck _no.”_

Shit, that sounded so bad. Sehun is afraid to ask. “For how long have you been together?”

Baekhyeon opens his mouth to reply, once, twice, backing down each time, before he finally says it. “Over two years.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” is Sehun’s immediate response. “Fuck fuck _fuck_.” He cannot be any more expressive than this. This is all he feels. The unarticulated severity of this, the wrongness, the weightiness. “Fuck.”

Baekhyeon is at a total loss of words, just his gaze jumping from place to place rabidly.  

When Chanyeol told him why he was breaking up with him, it was kind, it was teary, but all Sehun could hear was belittlement. Chanyeol cried. Crocodile tears. Demon tears. Tears Sehun doubted severely the genuineness of. Bottled ones, from the pharmacy, single use lubricant eye drops, a handful of won per vial. That’s what they seemed like. And Sehun counted them. Why not. Five tears. About two vials maybe. 30 won. Nothing. Breaking Sehun’s heart was worth 30 won.

But he went on. He made sure Sehun listened to him. Heard the leniency. Yet Sehun was being inscribed with welts sibilant by sibilant. Then there came the vacuous assurance. It has nothing to do with you. I made mistakes. I made myself lead a life I didn’t like. I’m sorry about dragging you into this. I’m sorry for treating you the way I did. I’m sorry for hurting you.

And it sounded good then. Almost. Maybe.

But what about the cheating now. What about him already being in a relationship when he approached Sehun in that café that one hectic morning. What about having a boyfriend of _two years_ at home. What about _that_.

Sehun takes the soju bottle. He pours. Baekhyeon downs it before Sehun finishes pouring, and some soju splashes on the table. He drinks his own too.

Baekhyeon wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

“Have you never suspected that he might’ve already had someone when he started talking to you?” He shakes his head. “or at any point. Just at any point, did you never think that—“ Peanuts. Two of them plopped in his mouth, and left unchewed. “Did he never slip? Did he never say anything like  ‘I have to meet my boyfriend later on’ or something, _how_ could he _not_ slip?”

Baekhyeon must be feeling worse than him. If Chanyeol also had a third guy, and he _might_ , that’s not improbable now, Sehun would maybe understand even better how it feels like, to Baekhyeon. Because this arrangement makes it seem like Sehun had what Baekhyeon wasn’t enough for. That Sehun was the one to fill in Baekhyeon’s insufficiencies. That Baekhyeon wasn’t enough.

And that must hurt a lot. Though Sehun is hurt too, Baekhyeon must be feeling much worse.

“Where did he even find the time for two of us?” Sehun asks instead. He picks up his soju glass. It feels bigger in his hand. Or his hand got smaller. That’s very likely with how much this disquietude gnawed at him. Sehun has smaller hands now. He drinks the whole glass to maintain this precarious level of tipsiness- if he gets drunker than this, he might just cry, if he gets any soberer, he also might just cry. He’s in the perfect equilibrium between these two, with a slight oscillation, where shit hurts and shit is funny, but not enough for any tears. Just right to be enamoured with Baekhyeon, and to think about what was, most certainly, a cerebrated cheating ploy.

“Did he really? Have time for you?” Baekhyeon mutters. He just dips his chopstick in soy vinegar and sucks on it. “I felt he didn’t really have time for me.”

Sehun doesn’t remember many good things now. What he does remember is insufficiency. He remembers wanting more. There was sex. A lot of it. And good sex. But Sehun wished some of it was replaced with something else. Things that didn’t involve their bodies so much. There were other kinds of knowledge that Sehun wished to acquire about him other than what made him come fastest, bestest.

He winces. He didn’t want to end up thinking about that. It ignites some squirming in his gut, a recoil.

“He didn’t have time for me either,” he says.

Sehun had fantasies. Sentimentalized, disneyfied thoughts. Of spending more time together. Having more dates. Blowing raspberries on each other’s tummy. Holding hands in the pocket of Chanyeol’s coat. Cooking together, burning pans together. Lazing. Drinking. Dancing. Studying. Fucking. Verbs. But nouns too. Being at peace. Just being. On the floor, on the table, on the bed, in the bathtub, on clouds and in heavens. Being around Chanyeol. Simple things. Nice things. Put his picture in a locket and carry it around. Because Sehun is romantic like that. Because Sehun liked him that much.

Baekhyeon’s gaze, gleaming with irritation, meets his, then lowers again to the table.

Sehun stares. Not even blinking. Blinking is for the weak and for people who still need their eyes. Baekhyeon’s mouthie is tiny. Chanyeol’s was big. Lips. Tongue. Teeth. He was big all over. And Baekhyeon is tiny. He wonders about them kissing. He can _see_ them kissing.

And it hurts him. This is a new pain. Like one more organ just failed on him. It quit. The salary was bad and it packed its things and now it's poking its pitchfork through Sehun’s ribs, seeking escape. Sehun is not a very good boss and owner of his own body, and life, given how many things seem to be going wrong.

Sehun should plaster a sign on his chest that says: now hiring new liver. He thinks it's the liver. It might be some other innard but Sehun is not sure. He's not eviscerated enough yet to be able to tell.

He looks at the table. Full of salty things. Full of saltiness. Just like them.

“Did he tell you that he wants to get married too?” Sehun asks. He’s already consumed by the remembrances. “That’s what he told me. He’s not all about this gay life anymore, he wants to be _normal_ , and get married and shit.”

Normal. Normal. _Normal_. That word is still ringing in Sehun’s ears. Kept echoing in the hollowness it drilled into them to this day. He hears it even clearer now. Remembers it clearer.

Why did he have to imply that what they had was abnormal. What about it was abnormal. What about it was so undesirable, so condemnable, so repugnant. What about _Sehun_ was like that.

Sehun is so caught up in resurfaced questions that he doesn’t even notice that Baekhyeon kept silent, and is now pinning him with a look fraught with stupefaction. “You mean he’s _really_ getting married?” he murmurs, voice tattered. “If he told you too, it means he really is getting married.”

“You know who it is?” Because it sounds like Baekhyeon has a hunch, yet Sehun isn’t sure if he’s ready to hear the answer.

“Someone his family tried to push on him forever, even though they knew we were together. A friend he’s known since he was young. I was friends with her too, at some point. We went out a few times together.” Baekhyeon picks up his tumbler, and throws it back. It had one drop left at the bottom. “Still, I didn’t think he’d actually accept it.”

So there’s a whole story behind it. It wasn’t just empty words. Of course it wasn’t. “I saw the pic of their engagement he posted on Insta.”

It was just two hands. A feminine hand holding his, rings on their fingers. It had likes on it. Many likes on it. One hundred and fifty-six. From people. Or bots. Sehun knows it’s people. Entire sentient organisms thinking that’s okay and happy and amazing. Like, _bitch_.

“Oh,” Baekhyeon’s mouth drops. “You’re still following him on Insta?”

“No,” Sehun admits.

Baekhyeon peers at him with understanding. With relatableness. He is, he was also checking his social media like mad all day too. This kind of zombism, of mania is an aftereffect of the breakup that perishes slowly, if, in cases, ever.

Sehun got to love him. The relationship still lasted long enough for Sehun to really fall in love with him. But the same way he had no say in when that happened, he also had no say as to when that dies. He remembers the symptoms of death. Pallor mortis, livor mortis, algor mortis, rigor mortis. Sehun thinks some parts did die. He wouldn’t want Chanyeol back, even if he were to come. He wouldn’t forgive him, especially in the light of the new revelation. But breaking up is just…wearisome. Sehun thought it was really similar to the early stages of liking him too. Where he couldn’t stop thinking about him. Wondering about him. Only then it was with expectance. Now it is only a cauterized cul-de-sac, while Chanyeol is still of interest to him. Sehun checked all his social media accounts at least ten times today. He listened to his latest remix on Soundcloud. His love might be degrading, but the attachment is far from decomposing.

“I don’t wanna see that pic,” Baekhyeon says with a rancid little leer, waving his hand dismissively. Sehun wishes to unsee it too.

“It was really blurry.”

“He sucks _so much_ at taking pictures.”

He does, indeed. A sensational ineptitude at keeping a phone still and pressing one button. Sehun even found it _cute_ once. What a harrowing prospect.

Baekhyeon takes the soju bottle, and chugs straight from it. “How could he…” the question drifts off, dies between them. “I never thought he’d be the kind to do this. _Any_ of this. _Fuck_.”

“I didn’t either,” Sehun says, taking the bottle when Baekhyeon offers it to him. “Though compared to you, I’ve only known him briefly.”

“It doesn’t matter because turns out we both knew _nothing_!” Baekhyeon spits, seriocomic emphasis on the last word.

Sehun nods vehemently, then he also chugs the rest of what’s left. He’s so drunk. But he needs more. Not more alcohol. Just something to alter his sanity even further.

“Think if he _invites_ us to the wedding.” Sehun bursts into laughter, choking on his own spit as he dismantles under hideous guffaws.

Baekhyeon joins him, guffaws just as hideous. “He _daren’t_.”

“He just might. We never know with that asshole,” Sehun musters through his heaving. This is so funny. Sehun can’t breathe. Sehun doesn’t want to breathe.

“We should go and ruin the fuck out of it if he does invite us.”

“Crumble it to the fucking ground!”

If they pile on top of one another they can make one serious, irrepressible wrecking ball. Use their bodies, or use words. Get a megaphone and shout it all out. Especially to the bride. If they got cheated on like that, he might cheat on her too. He might cheat on everyone. Cheating is chronic. It’s incurable.

They don’t have the means for it. They just have anger. They just have animosity. That might not be enough. They’re not gonna do that. They’re not gonna go to the wedding even if, by some miracle, they get invited.

“Should we...Should we murder him then?” Baekhyeon asks after a few moments, monotone, joking, but serious.

Murder. As in. Poison. Some accident. Things that kill. Knives, beatings, feelings. Run him over with accusations, run him over with a car.  

This means getting dirty, sweaty, bloody, guilty. Devising a plan.

“I don’t really feel like assassinating anyone,” Sehun says, emulating Baekhyeon’s tone.

Baekhyeon huffs. “So you don’t hate him that much either.”

They hate him, but they don’t hate him that much.

“I also wouldn’t ruin his marriage,” Sehun adds.

“Yeah, let the motherfucker have his little taste of joy.”

They hate him, but they wouldn’t want unhappiness for him.

So they’re not murdering him. They’ll stay on their asses right here and share between them what’s left in Sehun’s glass.

“What about us?” Baekhyeon asks further. He’s close again. He’s leaning in again. Like when he told Sehun he’s pretty. He won’t tell Sehun that he’s pretty again. “Should we like...catfight or something?”

Sehun looks at him. Slumped. Like he’s a shirt taken off its hanger. A heap. He needs that hanger back. Sehun leans in too. Their foreheads should touch. Should support one another. They should.

“I don’t want to fight you. I have no reason to fight you,” Sehun says. “But if you wanna like, kill me, I’m down for that.” Because he ended up being an unintentional accomplice to a crime. Sehun should be convicted. Should pay for it, even though he had no discernment.

But Sehun is jealous too. It’s suppurating jealousy. Nacreous. For being the illicit lover. For being two timed. It goes scrap scrap scrap at Sehun’s innards. Goes scrap scrap scrap at his barely-pieced together wellbeing. He used to carry band aids with his favourite superheroes in his pocket when he was little and stupidly adventurous. He thinks he needs one now more than ever. He pats his pocket out of reflex. Nothing there, but the receipt of a seven eleven purchase two weeks ago at two in the morning, two bottles of soju and two dried squids. As though Sehun was two people. He puts it back, so he’ll find it next time he’s looking for a band aid.

But it’s not just one kind of jealousy. Before seeing Baekhyeon, before knowing he existed, before knowing who he was, Sehun didn’t despise him. Sehun had no one to despise. But that didn’t come anyway. Where is the hate. Where is the enmity towards Baekhyeon.

Sehun is just jealous. Double jealous. Jealous all over again. Because Chanyeol was with him. Chanyeol had Baekhyeon. Baekhyeon was his. And Sehun doesn’t like that. Doesn’t like the thought of Baekhyeon being anyone’s.

Sehun hates the taste of jealousy. It’s something like a dissolvent. Something acrid. Sehun only has other brands of acridity to wash that down with, and he does that, taking a few gulps directly from the bottle.

There’s only a bit left. He thrusts it towards Baekhyeon after he’s had his fill. Baekhyeon takes it, finishes it. They don’t have many bottles left, but they aren’t gonna be drinking more. Baekhyeon puts it away.

“Don’t wanna kill you,” Baekhyeon slurs. “Don’t wanna fight you.”

“You can do anything to me,” Sehun responds. His head is dancing. The word is dancing. The universe is frolicking, and Sehun is trampled under its feet.

Baekhyeon gives him a baggy leer. “Then I’ll just—“ he says, reaching and picking a few corn puffs and pressing them to Sehun’s lips. Sehun opens up, takes them. His mouth is full. Baekhyeon gives him one more to make sure Sehun’s mouth is the _fullest_. “We barely ate anything,” he explains.

Looking at their pile of bottles, and looking at how much is left on their plates, Sehun sees the disproportion. Are they really insane to do this to themselves.

“Even if we don’t kill each other, I’m sure our hangovers will take care of that.”

“Don’t wanna die,” Sehun says. “I just met you. Don’t wanna die now.”

Baekhyeon smiles. Sehun melts at the sight. How is it so pretty. How is he _so_ pretty. Sehun cannot even compute such amount of prettiness.

“You don’t wanna die because you just met me?” Baekhyeon asks. His eyes widen, revealing his pupils entirely. They’re dark, they’re bright.

“Yeah,” Sehun nods, unashamedly. Because he’s not ashamed at all to say things like these. How can he be ashamed when Baekhyeon is like this.

“Oh. That’s really…cute,” he whispers. “I purchased a really cute boyfriend.”

“I didn’t give you your receipt though.” And Baekhyeon is close, and Sehun is yearning, and he’s drunk, so he drops just a bit further, angling his head, so his cheek brushes right against Baekhyeon’s. A lengthened graze of hot skin. Sehun pulls back slowly. “That’s your receipt.”

“Oh my god,” Baekhyeon exclaims. But silently. Tipsily. “Yeah, yeah, I’m _totally_ keeping you.”

He’s keeping Sehun. Sehun would love to be kept. “Please keep me.”

And Baekhyeon titters, dulcet, gossamer, the tip of his nose slightly, shortly kissing Sehun’s jaw as he bounces with the titters. That’s it right here, the leash Baekhyeon has put on him. All he had to do was giggle and now he’s Sehun’s master. Sehun is _so_ owned. And he _loves_ it.

“Do you think I deserve you?” Sehun asks. He’s not censoring himself at all. He cannot feel any shame, any remorse anymore. Sehun can just like Baekhyeon.

“Duh,” Baekhyeon says immediately. “Unlike him. You do. You deserve me. I fancy you. You so cute. And I like your ass. A lot. It looks fat.”

“You like fat asses?”

Baekhyeon purses his lips, and nods gravely. “So I got what to drown in.” He punctuates it with a wink. Then another, for good measure.

“Mine is all yours to drown in,” Sehun says, eager, selling himself yet again to Baekhyeon. He’s gonna sell himself piece by piece till nothing’s left. “No lifeguard will ever save you.”

Baekhyeon makes a pleased face, one that is all curlicues and acute angles, only to fall a blink later. “His ass was so fucking bony, I wished some lifeguard came for me.”

All topics end up dragged into this at last. Sorrow is magnetic like that. Sehun already remembers all the times he ate Chanyeol out. Those were usually their dinner dates. Often, Sehun wished it was actual food instead, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t eat Chanyeol out like the starved man that he _literally_ was.

“I would’ve saved you if I knew,” Sehun says.

Baekhyeon falls into a consonance of giggles, half self-deprecating, half false, another half actually joyous, another half sad, halves and halves, like Sehun can do fractions anymore, but this is funny, and cute, so he giggles too.

“At least I know for sure I won’t need saving from yours.”

Sehun blushes, looking down. His glass is empty. Their glasses are empty. And they have been for a while now. Sehun picks one up. They’re in the depths yet again, despite the lightness of their dalliance.

They were playthings. Each of them in a doll house, a set of plastic and lies. And it’s humbling.

They drink. They lean in close. They drink and they eat and get closer and closer. Cobwebby whispers strung between their lips, tales of woe, blue balls and blue hearts. Another soju bottle down. Falling like soldiers on the battleground, food for the vultures. Sehun wouldn’t mind being pecked a little by vultures either, just taking the rotten parts away.

They have one soldier left.

Sehun cracks it open. Pours. Downs.

Baekhyeon snaps the glass down. The table rattles. “And he never sucked me off!?”  

Sehun jumps, but leans in closer. He’s deboned completely now. His body doesn’t have any kind of infrastructure left. So he leans his torso against the edge of the table, drawing close to Baekhyeon. He doesn’t like it when his face is too far and he can’t see it clearly. Baekhyeon’s face is currently the best thing in his life.

Right now, however, it’s devastated by rage. “He said he doesn’t feel like it and then that my dick is too big? And he doesn't like doing it much anyway? Cause I give him a _throat ache_?” He falters, then adds a few more bolded question marks via turbulent hand motions.

Sehun has no idea where this topic came from, but Sehun is very in love with the way Baekhyeon’s mouthie said ‘dick’. “Well, do you have a humongous dong?” he asks, resting his chin on the lip of the soju bottle. His head is too heavy. Holding it up is too much work.

“No,” Baekhyeon replies firmly. “Hell no.” He nearly climbs the table to get into Sehun’s face. He raises his hand. “Where is this big?” he asks, pulling his thumb and pointer apart. His hand is shaking. Sehun looks at that gap and then at Baekhyeon’s hips, visible over the margin of the table. Estimating. Disbelieving. Putting that measure there, imagining a dick there and - Sehun shakes his head, refocusing on Baekhyeon’s open fingers. He shakes the hand in Sehun’s face again. “Where is this big? How is this big?”

“It's not very big,” Sehun nods because it seems that's what Baekhyeon wants to hear, and Sehun feels about ready to give him _anything_ he wants, even if that is size-shaming.

“Right? I'm tiny as fuck. Who can't suck something like this?”

“I can.”

“Right? You can! Anyone can!”

“And I would.”

“Well, you should then!”

Sehun’s eyes round at the outburst.

“Oh,” Baekhyeon gasps, suddenly blushing when he catches on what he just said. Sehun doesn’t feel any shame at all. Sehun is prepared die while sucking his dick, even though that might be hard given it seems he doesn’t have enough for Sehun to choke to death on. Sehun will choke though, just because he likes choking.

“If you’ll ever let me, I would suck you off.”

Baekhyeon’s blush deepens, little rubicund circles blotching on the crowns of his cheeks. Two strawberries. Sehun doesn’t like strawberries all that much, but there isn’t anything he wouldn’t give to have a bite of Baekhyeon’s strawberry cheeks.

“I’d like to be sucked off,” Baekhyeon says. His gaze is on Sehun’s mouth. Dropped there, nestled there, lids low. It’s an expression of an overt sensuality. Sehun presses his knees together. “I haven’t been sucked off in a loooooong time.”

He’s always pouting. There are levels of poutiness, but he’s constantly pouting. But _this_ is the grandiose, maximal crescendo of the pout, lips wholly broken away from his face and given the podium. It's shiny. Pink. Very shiny and very pink and Sehun doesn't know which one to focus on, the shine or the pink, before Baekhyeon backs down and the pout melts back into his face. The death of a star.

Sehun pouts.

“My dick is sad.”

“That’s unacceptable,” Sehun finally manages. “I wish to un-sadden it.”

“You’re the dick un-saddener!”

“The great!” Sehun confirms. He has confidence in his blowjob skills. Sehun treated it seriously. Gave himself milestones and everything. Sehun can really un-sadden the fuck out of Baekhyeon’s dick.

“Sehun, The Dick Un-Saddener the Great,” Baekhyeon repeats. His tongue, debonair, jocund, makes his lips glossy, his words glossy.

“Does that sound sexy to you?”

“Very sexy.”

Sehun curls up with timidity. “Baekhyeon The Sexiest finds something about me sexy.”

Baekhyeon throws himself even closer, all the way to the second plank of the table, only to look up and down what he can see of Sehun. “I think all of you is sexy.”

“But there’s a lot of me? Is it really _all_ sexy?” Sehun is tall. And broad. If he was tinier, if there was a smaller amount of him, then a higher percentage of him would’ve had a chance to be found sexy. As it is, Sehun reckons that only a few bits of him are passable.

Baekhyeon pouts and nods. Pouts and nods. Bigger pout and bigger nod, so the fervour gets across. “I really wouldn’t have asked you for drinks otherwise.”

Why is he attacking Sehun like this. Why does he have to be so _dashing_ right now. He sniffles pathetically into his chest.

Baekhyeon twitters. “But what about you? Did he suck you off often?”

Sehun hoped he wouldn’t ask this. He contemplates lying, but given how shit-faced he is, he won’t pull of a lie.

“He did,” he says, forcing nonchalance into it.

Baekhyeon is surprised. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Sehun feels guilty. Like he admitted to something that should never ever be admitted. He just signed his life sentence.

“But? But how? Why did he like it with you and not with me?”

Sehun doesn’t know. Sehun really doesn’t know. Given how enthusiastic Chanyeol was every time he went down on him, he didn’t expect for it not to be the case too with Baekhyeon.

He keeps silent. He doesn’t know how to answer. What’s safe to say.

Baekhyeon hesitantly presses on then. “Are you smaller than me? Like, _a lot_ smaller?”

Sehun pales. It really ended up at this question. “No,” Sehun says, the tiniest.

“No?”

“How then…. how big are you?” He asks it with such innocence, with such hopefulness, with such listlessness. He just wants to know why he wasn’t being sucked off.

So Sehun has to report his dick size now. He first tries with his fingers, like Baekhyeon, and as he pulls his pointer and thumb as far apart as they could go, he realizes…it’s not enough.

 “No way,” he hears Baekhyeon whispering.

Sehun just looks around for something to illustrate it with, and he sees the plate of jeon. The neat little rectangles Baekhyeon cut with his chopsticks. That might do. He arranges a few pieces in front of one another. Four of them. He measures it against the length of his palm, and he gauges it needs just a little more.

He bisects a piece, a string of green onion struggling between them before Sehun murders it for good, its guts severed. He adds this to the pancake puzzle phallus (bet you can’t say that really fast) he’s working on, measures it once more, and, yes, that’s about right. A perfect replica of his dick. Medium: jeon.

Sehun slowly looks at Baekhyeon.

Baekhyeon’s face peels off his skull and falls, leaving behind a gash of appalment. Sehun grimaces, and quickly picks the piece and stuffs it into his mouth. He chews. Guiltily.

Baekhyeon picks up his face, dusts it off, and puts it back into place. “That’s….that’s a really big dong.”

Sehun makes himself even smaller.

“Like, _that_ ’s a humongous dong.”

Sehun is now the smallest he can be.

“And he sucked your humongous dong? He made your dick happy?” He’s pouting. Sehun isn’t looking, but he can hear it. “Why didn’t he suck me off then? Is my dick that ugly? I mean, all dicks are ugly, but mine might be the ugliest duckling.”

Sehun’s heart hurts. Baekhyeon sounds so sad. Ugly-shaming his dick and drawing into himself. He, too, is at his tiniest.

“He did suck me off, but he wasn’t good,” Sehun whispers. “A blowjob is better than no blowjob, but as a blowjob in itself, it really wasn’t good.” He really wasn’t good. Sehun can totally trash-talk his fellatio capabilities. Cause, while enthusiastic, he was _shit_. “Like, you know, his _teeth_.”

That pulls Baekhyeon a bit out of his shell. “Oh. His teeth. Damn he had many of them.”

“He was so bad,” Sehun stresses, to make sure Baekhyeon gets out of the shell completely. “It felt like being sucked into a shark-toothed pencil sharpener.”

Baekhyeon laughs. Laughter. Aural laughter. Leaving a glowing halo around him. Revenants of joyance, lucent frills. Laughter that is visual more than it is auditory.

He’s a cuteness conjurer. Sehun has never seen anyone as exemplarily, legendarily cute as Baekhyeon. _Especially_ when he laughs.

Sehun holds onto the table to ground himself.

“I’m sorry for your poor humongous dong then,” Baekhyeon says with a weep. “It must’ve gone through a lot.”

“It’s in the Bahamas now, don’t worry. It’s having a good time.”

Baekhyeon laughs once more, when he suddenly balks. “Wait, what do you mean in the Bahamas?”

Sehun laughs. Sehun really laughs. This night is so great. Really, so great.

But he laughs so hard that he finally feels his bladder screaming. It’s been asking for mercy for a while now. Love is not only blind, it’s also a bladder hazard.

“Wanna go pee?” he asks Baekhyeon. He doesn’t want to go alone. He doesn’t want to part from him. Doesn’t want to lose him.

“Oh shit, I _really_ gotta pee,” Baekhyeon exclaims. So he’s been ignoring his bladder too. They’re both such bladder tyrants. To the stakes with them.

So they go to the bathroom. Together. Leaning heavily on one another. Like they’re married. All the while hissing under their breath.

They take urinals next to one another, sigh together. Over the background of steady, powerful streams hitting porcelain, Baekhyeon whispers, nearly in his ear. “I’m a shower, not a grower, in case you looked over. This really is all I’m working with.”

Sehun doesn’t want to see his dick now. Not here. Not like _this_.

So he squeezes his eyes shut, and chases Baekhyeon’s ear back. “I love it, baby.”

Baekhyeon shivers, rips from him, aims wrong and some piss splatters on the tiles. “Ah, don’t do that,” he chides, quivery. “Or do it again, please, I don’t even know.”

Did he just turn Baekhyeon on? Sehun does a little jump of success, which results in him also splattering some piss in un-splatterable areas. No regrets though. “You’re talkative when you pee,” he comments, _very_ coolly.

“I’m just trying to save the awkwardness.” Because really, how have they _not_ stopped peeing yet, they’ve been at it for eons.

“What awkwardness?” questions Sehun, for he really cannot detect any.

“You’re right. I think this is a sign that we’re meant to be then. The pee comfort.”

Sehun adores the sound of that. Sehun thought the same all night, and even more so when they found out who the motherfucker is. Because it adds up. The nexus, the fathomage, the murk and the cynosure are part of the mathematics of it all. If Sehun liked Chanyeol and Chanyeol liked Sehun, then Baekhyeon liked Chanyeol, and Chanyeol liked Baekhyeon, Sehun and Baekhyeon should like each other too. Sehun may be missing things, but it seems like a faultless formula.

When they go back, Baekhyeon doesn’t sit across from him, but beside him. He pushes Sehun towards the wall, then squeezes in close.  

On the table, they have some pajeon left. The pajeon is pretty good. Why did it end up uneaten. So they take a piece each. And then chase it with some of the nuts. The stinky gold is finished. Neither of them like acorn jelly, so that remains untouched.  

While they eat, Baekhyeon’s other hand is loose by his side. It touches Sehun’s here and there. Then purposefully. The brush is amative. Sehun didn't notice pain there, didn't see the bruising, until Baekhyeon’s fingers swept over it and erased it.

They curl up in their little corner of killjoy, maws occupied for decidedly non-sexy reasons, up until everything is cleaned up. Then they lean back. It’s about the time Sehun would unzip, his stomach distended with toxicants and sorrow, mouth astringent from vinegar. He doesn’t though. He’s not at home. He’s in a bar with Baekhyeon. He’s still in a bar with Baekhyeon.

Silence falls upon them. Comfortable. They’re each other’s pillow for now.

Then Baekhyeon moves. “What about…” he starts, then drops it. “I like it up the butt. Like. A lot. And he just…never really got into it. He never initiated it.”

Sehun thought this topic was left behind already. But it’s not. Not when Baekhyeon is so hung up on it, when he seems to be so hurt by it.

“Did he fuck you?”

And Sehun, yet again, can only be truthful. “No. Not really. I topped most often, but we didn’t really…” There was a lot of humping, and oral, more so than penetrative things. But Sehun remembers most vividly the lacklustre foreplay, the lacklustre make outs. Sehun likes kissing. He likes making out. Chanyeol didn’t.

“Oh,” Baekhyeon says. “So we both lost on this one.”

“More or less,” Sehun agrees.

“But…did you see my ass? You must have ogled it too.”

No point in Sehun denying it. “I did.” And he did so _thoroughly_ on the way back to the table.

“And? How much would you rate it? Would you wanna fuck that?”

“Eight out of five,” Sehun responds dismissively. “Because you know that has nothing to do with it.”

“It has _absolutely_ nothing to do with it,” Baekhyeon agrees at once. He didn’t even intend to fight it.

“I think it was shared between us. Some things he did with me; some things he did with you…”

Sehun imagines them kissing then. Imagines Chanyeol having sex with Baekhyeon. Smiling at him. Smiling at him _too_. His smiles, though frequent, were momentous, overlarge, exhaustive. When Chanyeol smiled, it was too luminous for Sehun to see anything else.

And Baekhyeon’s smile is tinier. Dimply. But so witty, so mischievous, with nuances and context, with argent pinks and glitter. It’s not brighter, it’s not larger, but it’s more arrestive.

“Now all I can think about is the fact that I might’ve tasted you in his mouth once,” he whispers, glancing up at Sehun.

Kisses. Chanyeol kissed him. Baekhyeon’s mouthie is too small though. A bit delicate, a bit elegant, a bit juvenile, and lasciviously vitreous. Only tiny, gentle kisses should be placed upon it. Did Chanyeol kiss him right. Did he enjoy kissing him.

It’s getting really graphic in his mind. A bit goreish. Sehun recoils, and Baekhyeon does the same.

“I don’t wanna think about that anymore actually. Let’s not think about him anymore, okay?”

Sehun would like that. Sehun, all this while, tried to do just that, and it all has been an ongoing failure. But right now, with Baekhyeon’s head on his shoulder, it seems possible. Very possible.

“Let’s think only about us.”

 

 

 

 

 

Around them, the fun demobilized. Waiters are yawning, eyes fallen into their mouths. They’ll be kicked out soon. He’s already seeing tables being cleared up.

Him and Baekhyeon don’t seem to be faring any better. Exhausting realisations, exhausting conversations left them exhausted. Just then, Baekhyeon yawns too. Tiny mouthie becoming the biggest. Sehun wouldn’t mind Baekhyeon swallowing him whole. Death by yawning baby lion. Wonderful.

He follows him with another yawn of his own, at which Baekhyeon simpers.

Sehun’s phone is dead. He doesn’t know what time it is. Looking at the fallen bottles, he only knows that he doesn’t want to put another drop of alcohol in his mouth ever again. He winces. His head is heavy. Like it got fat. Sehun should put his head on a diet. On a diet of not thinking of Chanyeol ever again ether.

Anyway, point is, it must be late as fuck. It’s been at least two hours since they finished the last bottle of soju.

“I’m so sleepy. Soooo sleepy,” Baekhyeon croons into Sehun’s chest. That sounded so good. Like he can actually hold a pretty note. Maybe he’s a singer. Sehun doesn’t know anything about his profession. Sehun knows so very little about him, and he cannot wait to know more.

“Soooooo sleepy,” Sehun replies, trying to replicate Baekhyeon’s note. It ends up sounding atrocious. Maybe. Surely.

“We should sleep.” Baekhyeon snuggles into him, the tip of his nose along Sehun’s collarbone.

“Yeah.” Sehun tries his best not to close his eyes, for if he does, he won’t be able to open them again.

“But not here. We’re gonna be kicked out like really soon.”

“Right. We should sleep in a bed. Comfily. We deserve that.” Sehun buries his face in Baekhyeon’s hair. That keeps him awake.

“Wanna come home with me?” Baekhyeon murmurs. “I got a bed.”

“That’s all I want,” Sehun replies automatically. To go home with him. The bed. He wants that so much.

“So you coming?” Baekhyeon pulls out of their entanglement to look at Sehun’s face fully. “Please come.”

The pout. His pout. Is pupply. Ducky, chickeny, platypusy. A full beak or muzzle, all real flesh and a cartoon contour. Sehun is simply incapable of saying no to him.

This is immediate, flashing enchantment. Endearment. This is liking. Sehun saw a million boys since the day Chanyeol went out the door to never return, and he’s never liked, met, remembered any. But this is a new boy that he remembers without having seen before. This is a boy Sehun took attachment into.  

“I’m coming,” Sehun says.

“So we can sleep.”

“I can’t wait to sleep.”

“With me.”

“With you.”

“I live really close by. Just around the corner, actually, if we take the shortcut.”

“Anything to get to the bed as fast as possible.”

Baekhyeon gets up, tugs Sehun after him. They stretch, rub their faces. They have to sober up a little.

They get out of the bar. It seems they stayed in there for a lifetime, and Sehun bides it some dramatic adieu, for he might miss the place. Baekhyeon laughs, and pulls him close. The air is cool. It’s the middle of summer, but at this hour, so close to the sky breaking into dawn, it’s cold, it’s awakening.

They’re still a bit drunk, just enough for the journey to be frolicsome, topsy-turvy feet, fused arms. Sehun has once again boarded the Baekhyeon Express and is being driven to a home. Some home. It only takes a few twitters, a few stumbles, a few pulls, and then they’re there.

 

 

 

 

 

The bed. It’s not made. It’s not his own. But there are sheets, ruffled and thrown, the duvet fallen a bit out of the case, three pillows. Sehun is sleepy. He wants in.

They stand in front of it, with some kind of reverence, and some kind of fear. When these mix, they asphyxiate. And something about this environment changed their behaviour, retailored their comfort with each other. Baekhyeon’s apartment, this closed space, instead of bringing them more privacy, more looseness, it pulled them apart, and allowed for reserve to sneak in between them.

Baekhyeon’s shoulder brushes his. Sehun looks down at him. Baekhyeon’s gaze is nearly limpid. A clean, warm brown. Earthy. No longer waltzing with celestial beams. “What would you like to wear?” he asks.

Sehun didn’t think of that. He’s wearing clothes that he shouldn’t sleep in. “A tee will suffice.”

Baekhyeon nods. Sehun watches him walk towards the closet. One of the doors is open, a button shirt hanging from the corner of it. He bends to pick at the stacks of clothes that aren’t really folded at the bottom.

He returns, pace skewed, one hand holding two tees, the other undoing the buttons of his shirt. Just three buttons, and he’s already in front of Sehun. He undresses. Slips the shirt over his head.

Sehun looks away instinctively. He’s not flustered. This isn’t flustering. Sehun wants to think it’s something like respect. For how little there is between them right now, looking at Baekhyeon would be infringement.

The tee is on when Sehun stanches a glance at him. He throws his button shirt somewhere – a hamper in a corner he had no way of not-missing from this angle. He sees other items fallen around it, as though he misses all the time. Baekhyeon hisses, disappointed, but not surprised. “I think it’ll fit you just fine. It’s the biggest one I have,” he says, gesturing towards the tee he placed on the bed expectantly.

Sehun nods again. It looks big. Is it Chanyeol’s. It could be Chanyeol’s. “It’s mine,” Baekhyeon says before Sehun could wonder more. “I don’t have anything of his here anymore.”

Sehun nods again. Nodding is easy. Nodding he can do a lot of. He does the same as Baekhyeon, undoing three buttons of his shirt, then pulling it over his head. It’s nippy in the room. It feels good on his skin. He doesn’t know if Baekhyeon is looking at him. Maybe not, for Sehun then hears the sound of a zipper. By the time the tee is on Sehun, Baekhyeon has discarded his jeans, thrown, failed, hissed, disappointed but not surprised.

Sehun drops his pants too. He picks them up, along with his shirt, and folds them over one another. He cannot throw them in Baekhyeon’s hamper. It’s not his hamper. And his own hamper is far away.

Baekhyeon takes them from him before he gets to find where to place them himself. He hangs them on the arm of the small, two-person couch on the other side of the room – did he cuddle with Chanyeol there. Did they eat there. Did they—

“Are you comfy?” Baekhyeon asks. His tee barely covers the tops of his thighs. Sehun makes sure his gaze doesn’t linger there for more than a fraction of a second. He cannot do that. He’s not for Sehun to stare at, not in this capacity of divestiture.

He looks down at himself instead. He is in a state of undress. Tee barely reaching the tops of his thighs, the hem of it loose, brushing by the skin in waves. He feels free. Comfy. “Yes.”

Baekhyeon smiles. Less dimple, less tooth, less lip, but with another kind of bigness entirely. Sobriety. Sedate gayety.

He turns on his feet and goes to turn off the light. There’s one lamp next to the bed that is on. He didn’t turn it on. Maybe he forgot to turn it off before he left.

“Then it’s bed timeeeee,” he chirps, diving right into the mattress, with a huff, a laugh, a groan, a clatter of them all into a concord. He climbs further on top of the lumped duvet and plops down on it, his smile breezy, tucked into itself. Baekhyeon, sitting atop the duvet cloud like a throne, makes double come hither moves with both hands, sloppily luring Sehun into his little heaven.

Sehun resits just a bit more. This is a pretty sight. Baekhyeon, in his bed, asking him to come to bed, is disarmingly pretty.

He drops his hands in defeat when Sehun doesn’t move. Baekhyeon waddles closer to an edge from the middle, his tee riding up and up until the hem reaches his waist. That ass is a total 10+. What was Sehun _thinking_ rating it an 8. He wiggles, turns, settles under the duvet, head against the headboard, and pats the space beside himself. “I changed the sheets recently, I promise,” he whispers coaxingly.

Sehun thinks he actually saw some sheets at the top of the hamper. So he believes him. He’s mildly hesitant, but he also wants to jump into bed too. And he does that. Though lightly, Sehun throws himself right there, in the spot Baekhyeon designated for him. He sighs. It’s nice. Talking for so long. Being on his feet for so long. Eating. Sehun doesn’t even remember when he left home. He sighs once more. Baekhyeon titters next to him.

It doesn’t smell like Chanyeol. it doesn’t smell like anyone. Maybe like Baekhyeon, if he knew how his hair smelled, what shampoo he used. Sehun tries to remember if he ever smelled another shampoo in Chanyeol’s hair – a shampoo that is in fact Baekhyeon’s. But he doesn’t remember. It’s just shampoo. The scent wears off quickly. It’s just shampoo and this pillow smells like nothing to him, other than a bit of freshness.

Sehun twists to look at him. His face is smushed into the pillow. That must not look very attractive. But Baekhyeon’s eyes curve tighter. Just the ends of them. The very ends for maximum cuteness. Baekhyeon is about to turn over and bury his head into the pillow too, when he stalls. “Ah,” he exclaims, nothing but a breath forcing his lips open. He turns around, fumbles on the bedside table. He hears a rustle, of plastic. And then Baekhyeon rises a little, holding a tissue that he wipes his face with. Blindly. Just blindly. Sehun recognizes the scent of that. A makeup wipe.

“Is it gone?” he asks, presenting his face to Sehun.

Sehun slides closer to take a look. It’s not. Not from everywhere. There are a few smears, and a few crannies that are still clogged with product. “There’s still some on your cheeks and eyes,” Sehun replies.

Baekhyeon pouts, folds the tissue, and goes back to wiping. But he just ends up smearing the same smears all over his face.

Sehun chuckles, sighs, and rises. “Let me,” he says.

Baekhyeon scrunches his face. “I _should_ wash my face, but the bathroom is too far.”

“I’ll do it,” Sehun says, stretching to take another tissue from the pack.

Baekhyeon shuffles close, and folds his legs under himself, then shuffles a bit more until his knees touch Sehun’s shin. His thighs are squished under their own weight. They look soft. All thighs are soft in this position. All thighs are inviting in this position.

Sehun looks away from them, and focuses on the tissue now, making a plica, and fitting his pointer finger into it. He holds it still over his lid, for the essence to dissolve the residue, then wipes away gently. His mother does it like this. To prevent wrinkles. Never tug on the eye. Baekhyeon keeps still, obedient, leaning in ever so lightly. Sehun grins, and takes care of the rest, taking away all the grime.

“There goes my beauty,” Baekhyeon says quietly, though with ease, as he glances at the two soiled tissues in Sehun’s hand.

“No, your beauty didn’t go anywhere,” Sehun responds immediately.

To Baekhyeon it might’ve been a joke, and Sehun should’ve jested back. But he couldn’t really. He’s…he’s really beautiful. The kindness of his features resurfaced. The honesty and rawness in its delineations. The droopy corners of his eyes. Tiny. Tiny but impossibly dazzling. Even more so than the shimmer that was once on them. The redness around his nose, the moles, the growing pimple on his temple, the faint, faint powdering of facial air right under the hilt of his chin, petering towards his jaw. It’s beautiful.

Did Chanyeol do this for him too. Did he see this all the time. What did he even see in Sehun. Why did he even need Sehun when Baekhyeon is like this, looks like this, smiles like this, blinks like this. How could Sehun shine at all compared to him. How.

Baekhyeon is staring at him. He’s in front of the light, so his face is shrouded in darkness, his hair a light brown, a slim halo around his head. Is he wondering the same thing as Sehun. Is he seeing his own shortcomings in Sehun. What is he seeing.

Sehun lets go of the tissues. He was holding them so tight. Too much tension in his arm. Too much tension everywhere. He stretches to dispose them on the nightstand. When he returns, he has no reason to be as close to Baekhyeon. But he doesn’t distance himself. He stays right where he was. Close.

Baekhyeon keeps his stance too. Keeps close too. And Sehun can’t tell if it’s only a blink, he can’t tell if it’s an intentional flicker, but he isn’t given more time to read anything before Baekhyeon leans in. He sees him nearing, and Sehun panics, he both panics and wants this to be what he thinks it could be. He hopes, he hopes, and he hopes, excitement bubbling over, flooding his thorax.

And it does come. It comes, so slow. He sees Baekhyeon’s lowered lids, his short, thick lashes twitching, and when he closes his eyes, when Sehun closes his too, it’s when his lips press against Sehun’s. They’re warm, malleable, but seeking. They impress a nip onto Sehun’s mouth, progressing into a narrow, velveteen skimming

His is mouth small, but his kiss is so big, panoptic, even without the scope of it. A realm of sensations, of feelings, haywire. Baekhyeon pulls away fast, the unslotting of their lips leaving a little, damp tinkle.

Is this all. Sehun didn’t even got to react. He only got to sense it, got the scantiest delight out of it. It was too short, it was too light. He’s about to chase him, when he feels Baekhyeon’s hand on the side of his face, his jaw, his neck, his palm spread over skin. And then he sees the twist of his head, as he leans in yet again, a bit of a nudge from his fingers for Sehun to tilt his face in the other direction.

And he kisses Sehun again.

Now, Sehun gets to respond. Not press back hard, but just to mould his lips around the shape of Baekhyeon’s, to greet them, to feel them, to fit with them, play with them.

Sehun likes it. He can usually tell if he likes kissing someone within a few seconds of contact, within a few movements. And it’s been rare, so rare for Sehun to want more from the get go like this, irrespective of the depth of acquaintanceship. Even his past boyfriends, he didn’t like kissing them immediately, there was always a build-up till he craved it. But he likes this. How curious it is, how explorative, and how kind, how encouraging, while in its technique, it’s superficial, it’s dry, it’s restricted, and Sehun is seeking purchase into the sheets, tightening his fist into it, looking to grab, to ground.

Their position is not the most comfortable though, their folded legs in between them, both of them stretching forward. It makes it so they can’t touch each other properly, which makes their kiss slightly impersonal, slightly detached. But they’re trying, trying to reach out, and in a slide, a collision, they part, lips broken. They stay like this, without furthering more from one another.

Baekhyeon smiles. The hand slides backward, so it’s on Sehun’s nape, surrounding it, fingertips cold, palm hot. Sehun shivers. “Why didn’t you lean in?” Baekhyeon asks. “I nearly thought you didn’t want this.” He speaks, a bit breathless. Or breathful, as it overlays on Sehun’s lips in little tides.

Sehun wanted to kiss him after they downed the first shot. And he kept wanting to kiss him. When he laughed and when he made that _one_ irresistible cheeky face and when he whispered to Sehun and when he put his head on his shoulder and when he nearly teared up as they talked about the motherfucker and when he bravely disclosed how he likes it up the butt and when he fed Sehun corn puffs and when he twined his arm with his and dragged him home and when he ushered Sehun inside, when he smiled at him encouragingly, when he wanted him here.

Sehun wanted to kiss him all along. But he didn’t. There were always reasons. There was always some kind of concern holding him back.

“Because this is your house,” he says. “And I’m so sleepy, I really don’t want to be kicked out.”

Baekhyeon freezes, pulling away enough to look him in the eye. “You really thought I’d kick you out?” he asks, and it’s amused, it’s surprised, it’s relieved. They flirted all night long. All morning long. And yet, he thought Sehun didn’t want this.

“I was invited over to sleep, not to do anything else,” Sehun says. “And I couldn’t disrespect that.”

Baekhyeon holds his gaze. Sehun doesn’t know what he’s thinking, what this stagnation means, what the tightening of his hands on Sehun means, but in a blink, Baekhyeon titters. “We’re going to sleep too. That’s still part of the programme,” he says. “But if you just want to sleep—“

“No. I want…” Sehun swallows. “Can we just kiss some more and then sleep?” he asks. Because he wants to. He wants both. In this order.

Baekhyeon breaks into a grin. “I think we can,” he says, and then, using both hands, he guides Sehun right back into his smooch.

Sehun wants to touch Baekhyeon too, wants to feel him better. He uses the back of his hand instead of his palm, as though it’s of lesser significance, of diminished meaning. He places it on Baekhyeon’s waist. Over his cotton, fuzzy tee. He runs it up and down along his back, just as Baekhyeon’s touches migrate from his face to his shoulders.

Baekhyeon’s mouth is now parted, accommodating. Ghosts of some bitterness from the alcohol, but mostly of washy felicity. Slumberous felicity. They kiss shallow but wide. They kiss with encompassing movement. Bare legs folded and overlapping. Baekhyeon’s palm is on his shoulder. His tongue over the margin of his lips. Tiny. An intimation of wetness, of unctuousness, giving body to their intimacy. They get closer, as it is foretold by the rustle and the protest of the sheets. Cheek to nose, cheek to nose, along with a few collateral Eskimo kisses. A few aberrant pulls. But it’s lovely. With how soft, how gentle it is.

Sehun’s heart accelerated, then slowed a bit, and now it’s rattling away again. Now, when there is some passion in it. Their closeness and caresses having matured, the sculpt of them daring. Sehun is hot, Sehun is blushing. Sehun is happy. Like he’s getting his sentiments requited after years and years of pining. Like this is the summit of torturous desiderium. It’s not off. Sehun wanted this. A lot. But only for a night. For this morning. He only knew Baekhyeon for this long.

He wants to bring him closer. A kiss isn’t just about the lips. Its materials, its dynamics, its emotions - they all come into play. Sehun wants more to be happening. For the adulation that doesn’t exist yet to dictate their behaviour.

Baekhyeon pulls away from him, Sehun realizes, chasing him beforehand. And then he takes his hand away from Sehun’s chest – his heart is not on that side, but surely he can feel it beating – and places it on Sehun’s arm, following it all the way to his hand, where he meets it, fills it, turns it. “Do you not like me touching you?” he asks. Soft. Pappy. Like he’s not made of anything solid anymore. Like he’s all fluff.

Sehun feels it. The soft of his thighs over his own. His other arm. His nose. His lips. Sehun loves it. This sensation. The novelty and thrill of it. The welcoming. Sehun loves Baekhyeon touching him. He doesn’t love Baekhyeon. But he loves his touches. It’s scary. Just a bit. But this is a monster he chooses to ignore for now.

“I like it,” Sehun says. “A lot.” Adds. Because he needs to.

“Then you can touch me too. Because I like you touching me too,” Baekhyeon says. And with that he turns the hand over. With that. Sehun’s palm truly is on his waist. The whole breadth of it.

Sehun smiles. He would laugh, had he been able to. But he can smile, smile as wide and long as it could go, which must look embarrassing, so Sehun quickly hides it into his chest. He feels Baekhyeon pressing his own smile to Sehun’s very cheek. He lets go of his hand. A low detangle. Leaving tingles and zaps. Then puts both of his arms over Sehun’s shoulders. Hands by his nape. Still smiling. Effervescence and buoyancy. Baekhyeon is touching him with repurposed, confident caresses. Holds him close, and holds him tight.

And Sehun can do it too. Put both his hands on his waist. Cup it. Its soft. Squishy. The bridge towards his hips. Lovesome and bounteous.

Then Sehun somehow is down. Maybe Baekhyeon was pushing. Maybe Sehun was melting. But he realizes that his head has now hit the pillow, Baekhyeon is following him, and only a second later Sehun feels the weight of him. He’s straddled. Baekhyeon’s undies on his tummy, his bare calves aligned with Sehun’s thighs. He feels good. He feels just right. When Chanyeol got over him like this, on the rare times, it always felt like too much. But not Baekhyeon. Baekhyeon. Is just enough for Sehun to only feel his presence.

He touches up and down his back. His neck too, slightly. He’s sensitive. Responsive but it could also be overdone. He kisses Sehun with a bit of tongue. A bit of nuance into it. The warmth is growing. The enjoyment is growing. Sehun touches him some more. He feels good. His undulations, his rondures, the softness and the hardness. Sehun wants to feel more of him. Not only with his hands. But his lips too. His eyes. Look at him, know him. Know all there is to know.

Baekhyeon brushes away the hair from his temples. Tangles his fingers into it by the side of his head. He doesn’t pull. But he relaxes his hand. So it’s lax and weighty. Sehun keeps away from skin. Feeling skin is not for now. For this time age. Though he has no certainty about anything. About what they are and what they aren’t. But Sehun just knows he should keep away from skin. It happens though that his hand falls, and it meets the crook of his knee. That’s skin. It’s soft there. Of course. Baekhyeon pulls away from him, ends it with a peck that is out of the contour and reaches some of his cheek.

A childish kiss nearly. Like a colouring book. Doing their mightiest not to overstep the line. Just lip.

He pulls away. Sehun chases him. Slightly. There isn’t even enough room to chase for more. But he does so, and then he sees the collar of his tee. It’s worn, little specks, globules of fray along it. Stained a little, faint, ghosts over ghosts. and threadbare, with a slight transparency. Perhaps his favourite. Sehun has one of these shirts too. he won’t part with it till it’s too holey to hold together anymore. But he sees the dip of the collar, and from this position, with Baekhyeon leaning over him, nearly chest to chest, he can see down it. He can see from his neck down to the small hills of his belly, soft, and then his collarbones, the prominence of his pectorals, and the accentuated dale between them. Sehun sees all of this.

So he reaches to his shoulders, pinches the tee right at the seams, and pulls it up, up until the collar touches the base of his neck. His nudity is out of view now. He pets his shoulders to make sure the material stays in place.

“You didn’t like what you were seeing?” Baekhyeon whispers.

He liked it. Sehun liked it. Sehun, frankly, maddeningly, frighteningly, likes everything about him right now

“I should only see what you want to show me,” he replies. What they did so far, all this kissing, was close, but lacked basis. There was intimacy, but hollow, ringing phony. This, they could preserve. Could respect this.

Baekhyeon smiles. It’s reddened. Redder. Reddest. Prettiest. He sits up, weight shifting on Sehun’s hips. His hand goes over his chest, to his collar, and he holds it there firmly, as though his tee will unravel and divest him without his will. Timid. Touched. Sehun counts two stars in each of his eyes. A blink, and a third one appears in his left eye. Another blink, a twitch of his head, and he sees it falling. Sehun should make a wish. But he can’t think of one. Something about this situation is just too ideal. He doesn’t have a future now, a life outside of this. He’s suspended in this moment.

Baekhyeon doesn’t reply. He’s sleepy. They both are. But he rises slightly, his soft thighs tensing, the delimitation of them pronounced for a blink as he grabs the hem of Sehun’s tee on either side and pulls it down again. It had ridden up a lot, nearly above the waistband of his underwear, just around where Baekhyeon was sitting. He tugs it down, until it covers his crotch, and reaches the tops of his thighs again.

“Then I shouldn’t see what you don’t want to show me either,” he whispers, dim and impish.

This is cute. Smiley. Sleepy smile, that is mostly pinches and corners, not much flesh, not much brightness.

Sehun pulls him down again.

They meet in another kiss. It’s a lowering. A fall. A slam. Guidant fingertips on Baekhyeon’s neck again, in Sehun’s hair again. They kiss again. They kiss some more. This is a language too, it transfers something with semantics, with context between them. The response, the complementation, the synchrony.

Baekhyeon’s hand goes over his chest, down, to his flank. His palm is lax, heavy, flattened out fully. Just to feel Sehun. Not to entice him, not to pull at him, not to take anything from him.

They fall, slip, mesh, nearly on their sides now, chest to chest. That changes a second later. They’re not static, not idle. Sehun doesn’t know how he’s seated, lounging, he only knows how he is permanently arranged to follow Baekhyeon, to kiss him some more, to finish each one of their teases, to do all the things that feel good all over again, all the licks, the sucks, the bites.

Now it’s less about the weight on one another, and more about the alignment, more about the contact. Their chests can fully press now, the plasticity, the rigidity of them grazing against each other. Their legs slide together, sneak wherever they find space as space is made for them. There’s multiple kinds of chaffing, friction, the suave, lubricated one of their lips, their tongues, the hands on the tees, the skin and the cotton, and then, just the skin, their bare legs and high up their thighs, even a bit of their clothes. A mayhem of materials. There is a bit of everything.

It’s an act of intimacy that is so exhaustive, so complete. And Sehun likes it. Sehun likes it so much. He likes _Baekhyeon_ so much.

“I can’t believe he wanted me when he had you,” Sehun says in an intermission, when there is a gap to say it through. Because he can’t stop thinking about this. This calm and this joy mudded by ire. “I’m sorry that he did this to you.”

Baekhyeon halts on his way to placing another kiss on Sehun’s lips. He places it quickly on his cheek, then pulls away just enough to find Sehun’s gaze. He rubs at Sehun’s nape lightly, fingertips twirling into his hair.

“Why are you sorry,” he says. A suffocated inquiry, for they’ve been kissing the breath out of each other for a while. “Why be sorry when you did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong.” The thumb of his other hand grazes Sehun’s cheek. Sehun tightens his arm on his waist, brings him closer, to hear him better, feel him better. “And at last, he left the both of us.”

He left. Abandoned them. It is a form of abandonment.

“But I’m sorry. Just because you hurt.” Sehun hurt too. A lot. He still does. Maybe not a lot. But hurting sucks. He wishes no one ever hurts. And he especially wishes Baekhyeon doesn’t hurt.

Baekhyeon blinks. His lashes are quite long, now that he sees them up close. Dark tinsels around the mellowest eyes. “You’re kind of kissing it better right now though.” He does a baby wink.

Sehun’s heart soars. “Do I, really?”

“Well, not _really_ actually, because right now you’re not—“

Sehun kisses him. Sehun already couldn’t wait to kiss him again. Baekhyeon expected this. Baekhyeon waited for him, parted his lips for him.

They twist. They’re on the other side of the bed. Baekhyeon is under him, legs parted for Sehun to fit between them.

His grasp on Sehun, in its tightness, placement, expanse, is affectionate, yearning. As though Sehun matters to him. As though touching Sehun is pleasurable to him. As though Sehun’s presence, this close, this lustful, is a cherishment.

It shouldn’t be. They have met only a few hours ago. It’s all they have, a few hours. Baekhyeon’s fingers shouldn’t be digging into his sides as though he never wants to let go. Baekhyeon shouldn’t bruise him with his grasp, he shouldn’t be leaving more than reds on Sehun, but he’s moving onto periwinkles, blues. Misplaced, mistimed hues.

But they’re welcomed. So welcomed. It’s not growing arousal. But growing romance. Not hotness, but warmth.

Sehun is in charge now, Baekhyeon having softened, now being only a follower, and enjoyer of Sehun’s whim. It’s dwindling down – the rush, the intensity. They went through all the stages. From curious to comfortable to daring and egoistic to filthy to fast and now, now it’s just lazy. Just knowing that whatever they do is pleasurable. Is comfortable. Is perfect. A whole lifespan of kisses within a fraction of an affair.

Sehun deviates from his lips toward his cheek. He pecks it. Adorns it with one light, behaved nip. Springy flesh. Sehun pecks it again, a bit more daring.

“I like kissing you so much now,” Baekhyeon says almost into his ear. Sehun drags his peck back to his lips, kisses him once more, and pulls away. Baekhyeon giggles. Sleepy. Bodiless. “I said, I like kissing you so much now, when we’re not even...anything.” Baekhyeon bought Sehun as his boyfriend with four corn puffs. They’re in a boyfriendship.

But that isn’t anything. They’re not anything. Nothing more than the two exes of the same person. Than two people who’ve been cheated on by the same person, with each other. Which isn’t anything. This truly isn’t anything defining.

Baekhyeon brushes his hand through Sehun’s hair again. Maybe he likes it. Sehun thinks he likes his hair.

 “I’m wondering just how much more would I like kissing you if we were something.”

Because feelings are there. Sehun has feelings now too. Of curiosity. Of intrigue. This isn’t pure attachment. But it is a binder. The way he feels beneath his hands. The way he is held. Sehun likes it just enough to wanna come back for a second helping of it, and a third, and a tenth, and perhaps all of them.

“We could try,” Sehun says, swallowing. It’s Baekhyeon’s spit. “Being something.”

Baekhyeon caresses him. He doesn’t pause. If Sehun said this to someone else, he would consider them big things. Voluminous and dense. Burdensome. But Baekhyeon’s little, red smile only softens, broadens. “Will you even want that anymore once you see me sober?” he titters. It would seem to stem from nervousness, but instead it’s from comfort.

“I’m pretty sober now.” But sleepy. Extremely sleepy. Which is another kind of inebriation all together.

“And you want us to be so something,” Baekhyeon whispers.

Sehun’s palm glides to Baekhyeon’s chest, then to his shoulder. He just feels so good. So right.

“I want it too. Let’s try being something. Anything.”

So this isn’t the last of them. Now they can kiss knowing there will be more to come. Maybe not immediately, but at some point, Sehun will kiss him again, and will be touching him everywhere, on skin. That sounds nice, so nice that when Sehun kisses him again, their lips barely touch, too busy smiling. It starts with impetus, but it mollifies soon, and becomes constant, moderate, perfect.

Sehun is over him, between his legs, and they’re touching everywhere they can, over skin and over clothes. It gives him plentiful excitement, even as everything dwindles, slows down little by little. Sehun’s heart is also too sleepy to beat too fast, his lips sleepy, his tongue sleepy, his hands sleepy. Everything is ready to sleep.

He ends it with a string of over-puckered, insistent kisses against Baekhyeon’s equally over-puckered lips. A lively duel of pouty pouts, until Sehun giggles and he falls off Baekhyeon with a dragged kiss along his cheek. It’s soft and plump and glowing. And Sehun gives it another kiss, just so he could sink into the flesh, emboss himself into it.

Baekhyeon is smiling when he catches his eye. “Now imma give you the real good night kiss too,” he quips, rushing right in with it and kissing Sehun’s cheek back. Cheek kisses are cuter when given by a cute person. And Baekhyeon just happens to be the _cutest_ , and Sehun preens until the mattress swallows him whole.

“Don’t hide! I can’t cuddle with you if you hide!” Baekhyeon exclaims, promptly making work of Sehun, unfurling him sufficiently so he can put his head on his shoulder, in the crook of his arm. He puts the side of his face against Sehun’s chest and peers up at him. “This is my place now. I’m the landlord,” he says.

Sehun snorts. _Why_ is he like this. “You’re gonna conquer the whole estate in no time.”

“Can’t wait,” Baekhyeon says, lips catty.

Sehun just boops his nose with his finger. It goes _squish_ under Sehun’s fingertip, and God help him, Sehun just died. Baekhyeon just wipes his nose on Sehun’s shirt as though it’s snotty.

He just won’t let Sehun win, will he. “This miracle will only last for like five minutes before my arm goes numb on me and you’ll be evacuated.”

Baekhyeon throws his arms around Sehun’s middle, then squirms in close. “I’ll make it be the best five minutes ever.”

Sehun cannot resist pecking his temple, and at first he does so over his hair, then he brushes it away and does it on skin too. So it’s a proper temple peck. Sehun won’t half ass a temple peck. Baekhyeon responds with a peck to his jaw. Double peck, even though he didn’t have the same justification as Sehun. Not that Sehun is complaining.

Form this state of sappy merrymaking, they segue sharply into somnolence, into fatigue, limbs leaden, immovable, and lids too heavy to hold open. They yawn, over and over, until they’re too sleepy to even yawn.

Before closing his eyes, Sehun asks, “Do I have to be gone in the morning?” There is some protocol to how this goes, maybe. He doesn’t know how comfortable he should get. He doesn’t know what’s appropriate anymore.

Baekhyeon huffs softly. “It’s already morning.”

The sun is rising – the room has been illuminating steadily all along. It will be up fully in just a few minutes.

“Do I have to be gone before you wake up then?”

Baekhyeon pens the slightest bite onto Sehun’s neck. Little teeth, little bite. But it’s deep. Sehun is now signed by his mouth.

“No. You have to be the opposite of gone when I wake up,” Baekhyeon says into his ear. “And you also know about how big my dick is. I have to keep an eye on you in case you want to sell that info to anyone.”

So he’s also a bit embarrassed. Sehun isn’t the only one. Now that the inebriation is clearing from their system, the things they’ve said are coming back. And they weren’t the most courteous things.

“I won’t be gone then,” Sehun says weakly. Sleep is calming him against his will.

“Don’t be gone. You promised me that I’ll see you when I’m sober. So don’t be gone. We have to undo the embarrassment.”

The pace is tardy, hefty lapses between his words, and Sehun is sure he missed some, but his only reply is turning a bit, curling himself so Baekhyeon can snuggle better into his chest.

 Sehun noses into his hair, smiles into his hair, and closes his eyes. “I won’t be gone.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> and now we aaaaaalllllll have a lil smoochie party :D 
> 
> (aka oh lord pls tell me what u think abt this cause while ive written bullshit style before but i don't think ive written THIS bullshit style oh god oh god oh god)


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